March 4, 2007 8:51 PM
Some Nice Loan Calculators
When it comes to personal finance, there is usually no one-size-fit-all decision. Options need to be carefully examined, usually in a quantitative way, to determine whether a particular decision is a nice fit to one's specific financial situation. To this end, I found the dozens of online calculator at iloancalculator.com particularly useful. These calculators cover some very typical scenarios when you need to get some hard numbers to back your choices.
Here are a glance of some useful calculators:
1) Accelerated Mortgage Payoff Calculator: find out how you can pay off a mortgage early, and how much paying off early will save.
2) Bi-weekly Mortgage Calculator: find out how much faster you could pay off a mortgage by dividing your monthly payments into two, paying every two weeks rather than every month.
3) Auto Loan vs. Home Equity Loan Calculator: figure out whether an auto loan or home equity loan will be cheaper, after accounting for the closing fees of home equity loan.
4) Debt Consolidation Calculator: figure out how much time and money you can save by "consolidating" a credit card balance--or multiple credit card balances.
5) Credit Card Payoff Calculator: see how long it will take you to pay off a credit card balance at the rate you are making monthly payments and charges, and see how much faster (or slower) you could pay off that balance by making larger (or smaller) monthly payments.
6) Lease vs Buy Auto Calculator: find out how much buying a car and leasing a car will actually cost, and which is truly the better value.
While online calculators are not scarce resources, what makes the loan calculators at iLoanCalculator.com particularly useful is it provides easy-to-understand explanation of relevant concepts with each calculator, and graphical presentation of the results.
Finally, here are some quick (and somehow surprising) facts generated by some calculators at iLoanCalc:
1) For a credit card balance of $5,000 at an interest rate of 18%, it will take more than 30 years to pay it off if you stick to the minimal payment of $100/month.
2) For a 30-year mortgage at 6% interest rate, one can save 5.4 years by using a bi-weekly payoff schedule. For a principle amount of $100,000, that's a saving of over $24,000 over the life of the loan.
While the above is a sponsored post, PFBlog is not required to provide a favorable review. Quality time was spent to study the subject website in completing this post.)
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